A degraded image of an object (e.g., a blurry picture of a mushroom), may be consistent with two or more possible interpretations (e.g., mushroom, an umbrella, etc.), even if one interpretation is ultimately chosen for recognition. Do these various interpretations all get activated in parallel or is the preferred interpretation the only one to survive the recognition process? To address this, we presented participants with low pass images of objects in isolation that carried a "primary" interpretation (one that observers most frequently produced in a free-naming task) as well as a "secondary" interpretation (one that observers often produced when asked to consider alternative interpretations). These images were briefly presented (70 ms) and were then followed by a lexical decision task in which the participants had to determine whether a string of letters were a word or not. On word trials, the string consisted of a word that was semantically related to the primary interpretation, a word semantically related to the secondary interpretation, or a word that was semantically unrelated to either interpretation (control word). The main finding was that the recognition of words related to the secondary interpretation took longer than both the primary and control words (i.e., negative priming of the secondary words). This finding suggests that during the recognition process, alternate interpretations of an image are initially activated but then actively suppressed.